When I met Abeer, a chemist from Yemen, her story struck me: she managed to become a woman scientist in a very traditional society where women generally do not study after primary school. She first left her country to carry out research in China and South Africa, countries where a veiled Muslim woman is not necessarily well received. She fled from Yemen for the second time when the war broke out in 2015.
I wanted to make a documentary film about her, about her beauty and tenacity.

Abeer and I worked closely together for a year: I met her in South Africa and in Italy. We had long exchanges by email, and whatsapp. She shared pictures of her childhood in Taiz and video files shot by her students as her home-town was destroyed by civil war. I realised that the whole story was about a simple and therefore not immediately understood concept: what does home mean? And with her I learnt that home is acceptance. Acceptance of who you are, of what you can or should sacrifice to make your dreams come true. And what you can win or lose on this journey.

The insurance company Generali asked me to join a team of filmmakers, architects and graphic designers established to enhance its historical archive collection through story-telling. The story-line would be the basis for a visual display that would be projected onto different screens in a brand new exhibition room in a building in Trieste, recently restored. where Generali had been founded in the nineteenth century. The company wanted something vibrant and contemporary, that would be able to bridge past and present values.

The most difficult part was to identify a narrative thread that would connect the highy complex story containing 15000 kilometres of historical, visual and written documents. In the end, we intertwined four macro-topics that encompassed all of the different story-lines and connected them in an “associative” way.

When Christian Bunyan asked if I would create a video for one of the songs on his newly released album, I had no doubt about which song: “Drunken Streets”. It talks about a lost love and its memories. The main concept for the video was the image of the sea rising suddenly from the harbour during the night and spilling into the streets of a small old city.

Into this dreamlike atmosphere I wanted to immerse four characters. A man with a dog, a young girl skating, a lady in point shoes and an old homeless man. As the sea takes the four characters by surprise with its wild Sudden swell, like the flow of emotions, each reacts in a different way: with enjoyment, by having fun, with acceptance or by escaping from the limitless flood. The man and the dog, a wolf, climb to the top of a hill to escape the sea and watch it from a distance as their faces melt into each other and become one.